Mamba News

The Best Way To Set Up Your Blog

Should I set up my site on Blogger or WordPress.com or as part of my website? In other words should you set up a blog that is separate from your website or not?

Please give it some careful thought before you launch!

Often people head straight over to a platform like Blogger or WordPress.com and set up blog on there for free. However we do not recommend this for a number of reasons:

The recommended way to set up your blog

The best way to set up your blog is to set it up as part of your website. It needs to be on your domain to get the full benefit. If you put time and effort into building up your blog and gain a strong following, you want to ensure that it is you that are benefitting from the results and not a third party site such as Google or WordPress or Blogger

Vote from Google

In Google’s eyes any links from one external blog only count as one ‘vote’ of recommendation, so as soon as you have one link, any further links don’t offer any benefit. If your blog is on YOUR domain you can create content which attracts links from many domains and increase the benefit of spending time creating good content, as well as capturing more longtail traffic to the domain which helps SEO

Save time and money

Although it may be a FREE and simple option now, when the time comes to move everything to be part of your website or to move it from yourname.wordpress.com to www.yourname.com or to copy over everything from blogger to wordpress, you either have to pay a free to map the domain (redirect all the links) or pay a developer to move everything over to your new site and ensure all links remain intact or are redirected to the new link (so you can retain the rank juice – seo benefits you have built up)

You own it

It’s on your domain so YOU own it – if blogger packs up and leaves then you will be stranded or if your blog goes down – then good luck getting hold of them to try and sort it out! With anything free there is always a price to be paid such as less functionality and options

SEO benefits

If you have a self hosted blog you can optimise it for SEO and benefit from that SEO

Setting up a self-hosted blog

Many web hosting providers now include a free WordPress one-click install option as part of the hosting package – it is very easy to set up or you can get your website developer to do this for you. You can then install wordpress (your content management system) in the root folder of your website or in a separate folder – depending on your preference.

If you have no plans to ever expand your business or you are not worried about any of the issues mentioned above, then by all means go for a free blogging platform. But things change and people who started a blog as a hobby have now turned it into a 6 figure business. So for the small cost to set it up in this way and buy your own domain and hosting (about £10 per year for a .com domain and from £14.99 for hosting) you should strongly consider going self hosted.